


nothing I want but money and time

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:02:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26073103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: Sonya can pretend all she wants, he thinks. He knows the truth, and he refuses to let it stop him from reaching for better things.(Five girls Boris Drubetskoy fell in love with, and one he didn't.)
Relationships: Boris Drubetskoy & Sonya Rostova, Boris Drubetskoy/Elena "Hélène" Vasilyevna Kuragina, Boris Drubetskoy/Julie Karagina, Boris Drubetskoy/Marya Bolkonskaya, Boris Drubetskoy/Natasha Rostova, Boris Drubetskoy/Vera Rostova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	nothing I want but money and time

**1.**

Vera puts her hair up the summer he turns fifteen, and this precipitates a minor revolution in the Rostov household. There have always been dancing masters but now there are more of them, and a real French modiste and an army of maidservants to air out the ballroom in anticipation. _November,_ Countess Rostova is saying, _before the holidays._ It reminds him of nothing so much as the plays they used to put on at Otradnoe in the summer: everyone moving the furniture around and memorizing the appropriate lines.

Nikolai considers it the most idiotic thing in the world.

Vera stands at the center of everything but also somehow apart from it, as if she knows exactly what’s going to happen and has already decided to be disappointed with it. She doesn’t know, though, Boris thinks. She can’t possibly.

He catches her descending the stairs in the front foyer, wearing something new made of white gauze and cut directly across the shoulder. When she reaches the first landing she starts back up, fabric slipping across the marble behind her.

“What are you doing?” he asks her.

“Practicing,” she says. “For my début. Maman told me to.”

At the top of the stairs, she turns around and smiles at him.

Vera’s smiles are not like Nikolai’s (good-natured) or Sonya’s (shy) or Natasha’s (incandescent). Vera only ever smiles when she _knows_ something.

“Have you ever kissed a girl, Borya?”

He blinks but doesn’t move. He imagines her in a month’s time, coming down this staircase to a room full of people, all watching.

He leans very deliberately against the banister and says, “Where would I have kissed a girl, Vera?”

**2.**

With Natasha it’s like summer lightning, the operation of some natural or supernatural force. He wasn’t even aware it was happening, and he thinks, vaguely, that if he _had_ known he would probably have tried to stop it.

Natasha is ten, looking up at him with an apron full of flowers, the bridge of her nose red from the sun. Natasha is twelve, dark eyes flashing toward him with secret merriment when old Uncle Shinshin falls asleep during the soup course. Natasha is thirteen and she tells him she loves him, which surprises him, perhaps, more than anything else.

He didn’t think it was possible to feel this way. Every opera, every play, every verse—he used to privately dismiss them all. Nikolai, he knows, has always liked the idea of romance more than he cares to admit, and he and Sonya do their best to recreate the more compelling arrangements, but Boris is a completely involuntary conscript.

Still, there’s nothing to be done about it, and before he leaves to begin the _career_ his mother is always telling him about, he promises Natasha he’ll ask her to marry him when she turns sixteen.

He doesn’t think about his promise very much. The Semyonovsky Guard is a new world laid open to him, a world with rules that can be bent and advantages that can be gained and profitable sources of information if you know where to look. Boris devotes himself to his education. Bank notes and commendations multiply in his dreams.

He dreams about Natasha, too, dreams about riding up to her with the Order of St. George on his chest and telling her he’s been made aide-de-camp to Prince Bagration, and in those dreams she looks up at him guilelessly and he _knows_ she’s telling him how proud she is, even if he can’t quite hear the words in her voice.

“She’ll disappoint you,” an adjutant tells him once, in a voice that implies he himself has been disappointed many times. “These childhood infatuations! Just wait until you see her again.”

When he does finally he finds that none of his memories did her justice. She sits with him in the drawing room, infinitely more grown-up now and yet still the same Natasha, and he is enraptured once again in stages. When she refuses him, it feels like nothing so much as an anticlimax.

Natasha is incapable of disappointment, he thinks. She was never even aware of the possibility.

**3.**

He does his best to avoid falling in love, and for the most part he succeeds. Competence with women—the handling of them—is an important field of play. He makes a study of the Fyodor Dolokhovs of the world, not to replicate them, only to learn. How to insinuate without promising anything, how to soothe and intrigue and deflect. Governors’ wives and innkeepers’ daughters. One can gain spectacular advantages in this way.

So when Countess Bezukhova detaches herself from the French ambassador’s arm and comes to sit beside him toward the end of one of her salons, he thinks of it first as an opportunity.

“You must come to see me on Tuesday,” she murmurs to him. Everyone, he thinks, can see the way her hand is resting on his sleeve. Up close she has an almost monumental quality, as if she were a goddess or a statue of one—anything, really, but a mortal woman. She is, as everyone says, very beautiful.

Later, in his rooms, he considers the possibilities. Boris has seen all the ways that a young man can be edified by a great affair, and Hélène Bezukhova is perhaps the most edifying woman in Petersburg.

On Tuesday he spends the afternoon thinking up ways to impress her. That evening she ignores him until the end of the party, and when at last she smiles at him he understands that this, too, was part of a strategy.

It’s very much like that with the countess—with _Hélène,_ as he is instructed to call her. He appears at all her evenings, makes conversation when the conversation is slow. She requests his presence at strange hours, and he is never too busy to oblige. He becomes intimately familiar with the Bezukhov house: the unrenovated back corridors, the grand ballrooms, and of course the boudoir.

Count Bezukhov writes him a letter of recommendation to the Masonic Order. Count Bezukhov— _Pierre—_ looks at him occasionally with something approaching suspicion, but never does anything else. Boris makes a toast to him in gratitude for his patronage, and reminds himself that the rest is none of his concern.

“You’re very good at following orders,” Hélène tells him once. It’s morning. He does up the buttons of his waistcoat, his fingers clumsy from sleep, and she smiles at him languidly.

He looks at her. All at once he can feel the blush spreading up to the tips of his ears, and he wishes that he had kept his head turned. _She_ certainly makes no pretense of looking away, and he thinks about her the same thing he always thinks: that there could be no more exquisite woman in the world.

It's all a game, more or less—he’s known it from the beginning. The trouble is that he can’t remember exactly when he lost.

**4.**

Plain and rich, that is what they tell him, and the father is a tyrant. This alone is not discouraging. Everyone says Prince Bolkonsky is still a general in every way that matters, and Boris knows well enough how to placate a commanding officer.

He finds the assessment to be more or less accurate. Marya Bolkonskaya _is_ plain, and her posture is retiring. Distinguished men— _important_ men—decline nominally superior invitations to come to her father’s dinner parties, but she sits at the edge of the room and pays little attention to conversation. Sometimes it seems as if she were only half present. In the world, but not of it.

It is not the least desirable of aesthetics, he decides, in connection to such an inheritance.

It’s easy enough to find excuses to talk to her, alone as she usually is. The answers she gives him are very often stilted, but Boris has infinite reserves of patience for girls with rich fathers. He asks her about the theater, about such-and-such a ball, about how she is finding Moscow after so long a stay in the country, and she responds in short, distracted sentences. Her eyes look past him and around him and through him, and never seem to alight on his face.

He speaks to her once for half an hour, and when he takes her leave to join the circle around Rostopchin she barely even acknowledges him. For some reason, he glances back. She is very much as he left her—she is looking at her father, now, and her eyes are full of some deep inaccessible sadness. Her eyes are very wide and very dark and—he realizes this suddenly—very beautiful.

And abruptly he feels something tighten in his chest. She has never once thought about him, he thinks with sudden clarity, never given one second of consideration to what he might want with her. And suddenly he feels—he _wants_ that—Marya Bolkonskaya, so far above the current that she never even notices its direction. He wants his wife to be like that. He wants his _daughter_ to be like that, to have so many advantages that she doesn’t even have to press them, to not have to _pay attention_.

He turns back to Rostopchin. It tires him, suddenly, to smile.

 _If she looks at me even once_ , he thinks. But he waits, and she doesn’t, and Boris drinks more than is advisable and goes home with the sound of the door closing in his head.

**5.**

He doesn’t love her when he marries her, and occasionally this bothers him. He watches her advance up the aisle toward him and he thinks to himself _this is my wife_ , but somehow he doesn’t quite believe it. They knew each other, vaguely, as children: Julie Karagina, cheerful and hair-ribboned and a whole fifteen months older than him.

Time and again he’s convinced that he understands her. She flirts with everyone, she smiles too easily, she has a fondness for sweets, and her Russian is atrocious. After they are engaged she puts off black dresses and melancholic attitudes, and when he finds her with _Poor Liza_ six months later she looks up at him and says, “Isn’t this book _funny_?”

Time and again she surprises him. It takes longer than it should for him to realize it.

“It was a lovely evening,” she tells him at the end of the night. “Count von Mencken said it was very well done.”

He gets the sense of something behind her words: a question, maybe, or a joke. She looks at him expectantly, and her eyes are as green as the forests he manages for her.

He recalls her with Mencken—her hanging off his arm at the end of the last waltz. “You spent enough time with him,” he says, before he can stop himself.

She smiles. There’s something familiar about it. All at once he remembers that she has tea every Thursday with Vera Berg.

“Well, it was hard not to. It was such a complicated situation that led to Minsky’s being recalled from Vienna, and I had to be sure I understood it all.”

He stares at her. “Minsky’s been recalled? Then who—?”

She doesn’t say anything but he can tell that she’s laughing. Laughing _at_ him, maybe.

He takes a step toward her. “ _Julie_.”

“What? I don’t know anything. Only I think that I _should_ like to see Vienna, someday. I have never been, you know.”

He’ll have to speak to the right people, he knows. Mention the correct things in the correct circles. He has a letter of introduction to Gorchakov tucked away in his office, and if only—

He is distracted by the movement of her skirt. She walks toward the staircase and he follows her, unthinkingly. “Are you going to bed?”

She turns, and if _this_ development surprises her she gives no indication of it. “I was going to.”

“I’ll come with you,” he says, and he can see laughter in her eyes once again.

She’ll never explain the joke to him, he thinks, but then he has always been good at working with incomplete information.

**+1**

She wasn’t waiting for him, that much is evident. After all, it isn’t as if he were looking for _her._ When he thinks about it, which he doesn’t often, he wonders if this is how it has always been: both of them always waiting, always _hoping_ , and never for each other.

Nikolai isn’t even here, he thinks.

“Natasha has gone to Marya Dmitrievna’s with Maman,” she says, stepping forward to pour him tea. “But please, come and sit for ten minutes, and I am sure they will be back before long.”

He accepts, mumbling his thanks. On his way over he’d been thinking of things to say—war stories, childhood reminiscences—but it seems foolish to say them now, as if he’d be wasting them.

“Natasha will be happy to see you,” says Sonya, taking up the embroidery from which he disturbed her. She smiles, as if to reassure him. “I think it was very good of you to come back for her, you know.”

He looks up at the ceiling, his eyes searching for the dent in the wallpaper where Nikolai threw his toy saber across the room during a particularly charged recreation of the Battle of Poltava ten years ago. “She’s not going to marry me,” he says, without thinking about it.

It isn’t something he’s ever admitted to himself before, but he understands the truth of it at once.

“Why not?” Her smile has disappeared, and her eyes are wide—not with alarm but with confusion, as if they’d been rehearsing a scene together and he had gone suddenly and disastrously off-script.

She hasn’t changed, he thinks. How strange it is, that Natasha can be so completely transformed, while she stays exactly the same.

“She’s not going to marry me,” he repeats, more certain of it now than ever. “And even if she would—I don’t think—we couldn’t—you _know_ how the finances are.”

She goes suddenly very still. Her gaze drops to the embroidery in her lap, the stitches neat, perfect. “We shouldn’t talk about such things, Boris,” she says. “It’s mercenary.”

There’s a certain resolution in the tone of her voice. It occurs to him that she _does_ know, and is trying not to, and the thought makes him strangely and irrationally angry.

“Well, why shouldn’t we be mercenary?” he says. “I don’t have a father to pay off my gambling debts fifty thousand rubles at a time. You don’t, either.”

She avoids his gaze but he can see the hurt spread across her features, and at once he feels ashamed. Partly for offending her, and partly for being imprudent enough to say such things out loud. Vulgar things, _revealing_ things. “I didn’t mean—”

In the distance, a door opens. Natasha’s laugh, high and bright, filters in from the foyer.

Boris sinks back into his chair. “Never mind,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she says at once. “We won’t speak of it.”

Her troubled expression dissolves immediately—Sonya has always been quick to smooth over discomfort, and that, too, hasn’t changed—but she avoids looking at him for the next half hour. If Natasha detects any disquiet between them, she cheerfully ignores it.

Boris looks up at the dent in the ceiling once more. He feels inexplicably tired. He feels the sense of something ending, of something long and drawn-out finally coming to a close. It isn’t the last time he’ll sit in the Rostovs’ parlor, he knows, but it occurs to him now that it’s one of the last.

The prospect is strangely comforting. Sonya can pretend all she wants, he thinks. He knows the truth, and he refuses to let it stop him from reaching for better things.

**Author's Note:**

> me: has a lot of promising story ideas for different fandoms
> 
> also me: you should write a 5+1 about Boris Drubetskoy's romantic life
> 
> (I honestly don't really know where this came from, but I HAVE always had kind of a soft spot for Boris and his unrepentant social climbing. He is 100% devoted to the grind, and we cannot argue with his results!)


End file.
